Co-operative control coordination of a team of underwater vehicles with communication constraints

Co-operative control architectures for implementation of motion plan and coordination strategies for a team of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) using different optimization techniques are presented in this paper. The paper addresses the leader-follower formation control of multiple non-holonomic AUVs where one AUV is designated as Leader and the other participating AUVs are treated as the followers. In this scenario, the leader operates according to its optimized path, while each follower is required to follow the leader accurately maintaining desired separations and orientation with respect to the leader. A communication strategy is also designed so that the AUVs can exchange information to obtain the designated waypoints that are sent from the leader following the area coverage problem. Optimization is necessary to determine the optimal path as functions of sensor nodes for control coordination of a team of AUVs satisfying the time minimization. Various optimization algorithms have been employed for control coordination and search strategies of co-operative motion control of a group of AUVs without incorporating learning and memory to evaluate the objective function. The CLONAL selection algorithm is found to be one of the best approaches to plan the formation leader motion utilizing the triangular sensor-based grid coverage technique. The efficacy of the proposed optimization approach to solve the co-operation motion of a group of AUVs is verified through MATLAB simulation studies and the results confirmed the robustness and efficiency of the proposed technique over existing search methodologies, such as Coordinate, Multi-directional, Simplex and Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation.